


Blood and Ashes

by PaladinofFarore



Category: Wonder Woman - All Media Types, Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:26:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23068444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaladinofFarore/pseuds/PaladinofFarore
Summary: The world would need a champion one day, the vision told Gabrielle. A warrior for love.On the shore of Themyscira, the last and true home of the Amazons, Gabrielle forms a baby girl out of clay, a baby girl who would one day be a legend.
Relationships: Gabrielle/Xena
Comments: 13
Kudos: 52





	Blood and Ashes

She’d ignored the vision at first. 

_I have the gift of prophecy_. 

She nearly sneered at the memory. Visions were fickle. They were the half formed thoughts of the cosmos that had found their way into the dreams of poor unfortunate mortals, and their only purpose seemed to be to torment. Not to warn. 

Warning had not saved the two of them from dying on the cross. And when it might have mattered, no warning came to stop her soulmate from dying in a distant land. 

No. Gabrielle did not put weight in prophecy. 

And yet….and yet...

She knelt alone on the beach. The moon was full, a radiant pearl suspended in the night sky. The scent of salt and summer flowers hung heavy in the air. The sea was quiet, nearly flat and devoid of waves or ripple. A night of complete and utter calm. Perhaps it was an omen. A sign that what the night brought, would bring peace with it. 

Gabrielle took in a long, shuddering breath. Her bare skin prickled. 

She was naked. Her possessions, her pack and scrolls, her armor and weapons, had been left up on the island proper. She’d been afforded rooms fitting a queen. They’d barely been touched in her time there. In the years since the birth of this place, this new paradise, she had thrown herself into her work, into uniting the disparate remnants of their people into a single united tribe. She had thrown herself into her crown. 

It made it easier to forget herself for a time. 

This, she knew as she lifted the knife, would be her final duty as a queen. 

_A figure, a woman, draped in stars. In red and blue and gold._

Turning the blade in her hand, she regarded its sheer, glimmering surface, brighter even then the moonlight on the water. A blade of Athena, of all things. The goddess of wisdom had left little to the world on her death beyond tyranny and numerous crumbling temples. It would serve a new purpose now. 

_A champion, a warrior of love._

Gabrielle set it aside, placing it beside a small leather pouch. She tried not to look at it. Not until the moment came. 

She leaned forward, placing her palms on the earth surface of the beach. The clay was soft in the warm climate, like firm dough ready to be kneaded into bread. In the moonlight it looked nearly white as fine marble. Breathing in, Gabrielle pressed in with her fingers, testing. The clay gave beneath her touch. Gabrielle breathed out. 

She began to work. 

The torso came first. A halfway point between a cylinder and a rectangle. It started out lumpy and illformed, with pocks and knicks left behind by her fingernails. Words had been the art she’d been known for, so long ago, when she’d been a bard instead of a warrior. Visual mediums were not something in which she was practiced. 

But as she went, her mind slipped away. The conscious movements of her hands became distant. Yet, in a trance, fixated on the task at hand and the vision still so clear in her memory, she worked on. 

_“The world will need a champion,” she’d said to Aphrodite. They’d stood on the newly constructed terrace before the library. All the knowledge of the amazons collected together. Newcomers were still arriving then, ships from Arabia, Mongolia, Chin, from every surviving tribe they could find._

_Even a ship from distant Japa had arrived._

_She had bowed stiffly as the eastern warrior women had offered their condolences. She knew she was being unfair when she walked away without a word. In that moment, she didn’t particularly care._

_“They’ve got one, sweetpea,” the goddess had said pointedly. She was newly radiant with worship. As the patron of a new nation, the love deity shone with as much power as she ever had. She had draped the nation in immortality, the amazons would live forever, hidden from the world. Gabrielle shook her head._

_“No, not me.”_

The arms and legs came next. She rolled them in her hands, folding them together until they resembled the chubby limbs of a babe. 

_“Something more than me.”_

_The goddess was going to object. To her, the bard was already a champion of many things. Love in particular. Eventually, she shrugged, filmy pink ribbons dancing with the movement._

_“Ok, sweetie. I’ll help how I can. Now, run me through the vision of yours one more time.”_

The head was the last and the most difficult. With her thumbs she carved out the sockets for the eyes. With her nails she traced the lines of what would be hair. Carefully, she pulled at the sides to make ears. All this she did in a blur. A haze somewhere between drunkenness and true mania. 

Her eyes _opened._ She blinked, and looked down at the space between her knees. 

A girl. A baby girl made of clay. 

Gabrielle smiled. A small, wan smile. A sheen of sweat covered her brow and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. She reached for the knife once more. It felt heavier in her exhausted grasp. She looked up at the sky, and the moon and the stars. The constellations swirled, and in that instant, that tiniest space of time, she was a slip of a girl, with long hair gazing up at those same stars in wonder. 

Staring up at that tall, dark stranger who’d wandered into her life as if by chance. 

_Wonder_

So much of the world's wonder had been stripped away. Little by little, piece by piece. The stories began to ring hollow. For all the joy, the beauty that the bards sang of, there were layers and layers of blood. Blood, pain, death, hatred. The gods were tyrants on their thrones. Tragedy struck swifty and without reason. And even Xena had lost her luster in time. 

The Warrior Princess was just a woman. 

And yet...beneath those layers she had found something else. 

There was power, meaning beyond the gods. They were not the sole arbiters of the universe. Tragedy was opposed by miracles. Those small, almost invisible moments that were strung across life like a jeweled necklace. 

Xena had been a woman. A mortal woman with a heart full of guilt. 

And Gabrielle loved her. Loved her with her whole soul. 

“Be with me,” she whispered as she drew the blade of the knife across her palm. The blood came hot and fast. She closed her hand, letting it leak between her fingers and stain her skin. With her free hand she reached out and took the pouch.

In a single swift, deliberate motion, she emptied its contents into her bloodied palm. 

The ashes, a small piece of what remained of her beloved’s mortal form, stung sweetly. 

“You who are unformed!” she recited to the night, voice echoing as a bards should. Loud and melodious for all to hear. “You who are of the earth, I bless you. With blood of my blood I bless you!”

Red drops fell to spatter themselves against the clay child's face. 

_A woman draped in stars. A coil of molten gold spun around her hands, not a string of fate, but of truth itself._

“I bless you with ash! I bless you with she who I love! I bless you!” 

Gabrielle opened her hand and smeared it against the clay figure. Along the chest, the arms, and up to the brow. She leaned down, bringing her face close to the smaller, earthen one. 

“With my hands I make you, child, and with your hands may you bless us.” 

She looked up, and Aphrodite was kneeling across from her. The goddess, free of her usual flair and superficiality, leaned forward. 

“With love you are born child. With love, live.” 

Aphrodite pressed a kiss to the clay brow. 

A babe cried out, and a life began. 

For the first time in years Gabrielle felt tears trickle down her cheeks. 

_“A champion with her strength, and your heart,” Aphrodite had said in awe. “That’s what your vision showed you.” Gabrielle scoffed._

_“I don’t know about that.” She had little faith in her own heart those days. “I just...did what had to be done.”_

_“She’ll have a piece of you, sweetheart. You and her both.”_

_“Is it arrogant of me?” Gabrielle asked. It could so easily be hubris, to imbue the champion, a savior, with herself and her long dead spouse._

_“No,” Aphrodite said. “I think it’s exactly what we need.”_

When Gabrielle stepped into the courtyard of the royal pavilion, she was draped in a simple white shift. Her knees were still covered in the clay of the beach and her palm screamed an angry red beneath the light bandage. 

Her fellow queen was right where she’d been expected to be. 

She sat at a long wooden table covered in maps, ledgers and other information. 

Hippolyta cut a striking figure. Tall, with long golden tresses tucked behind her shoulders, she was the very image of an amazon queen. Imposing, muscular, and beautiful. At her side stood an even taller woman, very much the picture of an amazon warrior. Short cropped hair, dark, Nubian skin, and an ever present spear in her hand. Phillipus was the finest general the amazon nation had to offer. 

The pair looked up as Gabrielle approached, holding a bundle to her chest. 

“Where have you-” the queen began. She was silenced when Gabrielle pressed the bundle into her arms. A pair of small, ashen colored eyes peered up at her. 

“Behold, your daughter,” said Gabrielle. 

Hippolyta looks up at her, dumbfounded. Gabrielle almost laughs. She’s seen the woman wear many expressions, pride at what they’d accomplished for their nation, anger at what the likes of Rome had done to them, even disappointment after the misguided evening they’d fallen into bed together. She had never seen her fellow queen _shocked._

“I cannot accept this,” she finally said. 

“You can,” Gabrielle shot back. 

“But she is yo-”

“Motherhood is a path that has long since been closed to me,” the once bard, now queen replied. “Once, maybe. But not now….” Not without her.

Enough children had been ripped from her hands by circumstance. This one she would place willingly into loving arms. Hippolyta closed her eyes, brow furrowing in concentration. She opened them and looked down at the child. A peal of laughter rang out in the courtyard like the tinkling of bells. 

“This is what your vision showed you?” 

Gabrielle nodded. It was more or less true. 

“She will be the greatest of all amazons. If you all will teach her to be so.” 

Hippolyta’s face hardened. There was the battle commander, the war queen. 

“You still intend to leave us? To forsake the gift given to us?” 

Gabrielle looked around. 

Themyscira had become a city so quickly. The great stone columns, the great monuments of queens passed that stood sentinel over it all, they put even Athens and Rome to shame with their splendor. It would stand for all time. 

She thought of the lines of the mendhi. Of two threads bound so tightly that the cosmos shook. 

She...would never stand that long. Even amongst all she had done and built. 

“Immortality isn’t for me. I...I know what my eternity is going to be. I love all of you. I love our people. But my place is not here.” 

Hippolyta made a noise. She swirled her fingers beneath the child's chin, earning a giggle. Phillipus nodded. Gabrielle had always appreciated her straightforward nature. 

"You intend to chase her into eternity," said the general. Not a question. Gabrielle nodded. 

"I do."

“Does she have a name?” the queen asked. She rearranged the babe in her arms. Her little mop of hair was silky black, and her lips were light red like fading blood. 

“Diana,” replied Gabrielle. “Her name is Diana.” 

She departed that next morning. Donning her armor, sword on her back, chakram on her hip, she boarded a small boat and rowed away, leaving both the island and her time as a queen behind. Her feet would find the road again and she would be off.

That road would end in her death, she knew. Her fate was not to stand forever as an immortal or to die withered in her bed. She would fall on a battlefield somewhere, blood on her lips, and a life having been saved. 

As she grew more and more distant from the island she took one last look. 

The statue of Ephiny was visible from that angle, proud and strong, but no stone could ever truly capture such a woman. Gabrielle sighed. They would erect one of her to go beside it. They would make her immortal in one fashion or another. The amazons were simply stubborn in that way. 

She thought again of her vision. Of the primal knowing that had come to her. 

Of the results she had no intention of living to see. 

“She’ll be like us, I think,” she said to Xena. Her beloved could hear her, she thought, whether it be in the depths of some afterlife, or in the churning souls of rebirth. She could hear her. “She’ll be like us, my love. But...more.” 

She would be a warrior of love. With eyes full of wonder. 

**Author's Note:**

> I remember listening to Xena Warrior Podcast and the ladies commenting that if you put Xena and Gabrielle together, you'd get an amazing person. I couldn't help but think, 'you'd get Wonder Woman.'  
> The idea for this came from ohnopenopenope on tumblr. I just couldn't get it out of my head.


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